Fast Food

I’m no fan of McDonald’s, and as Morgan Spurlock proved, eating too much of the processed junk they pass off as food is calamitous for your health … but this ad from the nonprofit vegan group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine takes criticism of Mickey D’s to a whole new level!

Artist Sally Davies runs the classic, terrifying “McDonald’s burger time-lapse” experiment. The goal of course is to see how long it takes food from McDonald’s to alter in appearance even the slightest…

TOLEDO, Ohio — A security video from a McDonald’s in Ohio shows a woman punching two restaurant employees and smashing a drive-thru window because she couldn’t get Chicken McNuggets.

The tantrum caught on tape in Toledo earlier this year shows the customer reaching through the drive-thru window, slugging one worker and then another. She then grabs a bottle out of her car and tosses it through the glass window before speeding off.

It happened early on New Year’s Day. Police say Melodi Dushane was angry that McNuggets weren’t being served, because it was breakfast time.

I have tried to figure what the hell this is about, the site Know Your Meme did an exemplar job of why the internet media is even talking about this now, and Matt Zoller Setiz on Salon made a good connection where some of the video was sourced from:

Congratulations Double Down, you are now the sandwich against which all others will be judged. Via fivethirtyeight:

KFC’s Double Down Sandwich, an in-your-face collection of bacon, cheese and something called Colonel’s Sauce betwixt two fried chicken “buns”, is making waves for its unapologetic gluttony, compelling reviews out of everyone from the New York Times‘s Sam Sifton to the Onion‘s Nathan Rabin.

But is it really the caloric monstrosity that it appears?

Let’s start with the Double Down’s calorie count: 540 calories for the crispy “Original Recipe” version and 460 for a grilled variant. Those seem like big numbers, but by fast food standards, they’re pretty mild: the Burger King Chicken Tendercrisp weighs in at 800 calories, for instance, and Jack-in-the-Box’s Ranch Chicken Club will set you back 700. Calorie counts for burgers are even higher: 1,320 for a Hardee’s Monster Thickburger, and 1,350 for a Wendy’s Triple Baconator. Even the humble Big Mac, a lightweight by modern standards, contains 540 calories, exactly the same number as the Double Down.

In the sprawling military base at Kandahar, the fast food outlets facing the axe include Burger King, Pizza Hut, and the U.S. chain restaurant T.G.I. Friday’s that features a bar with alcohol-free margaritas and other drinks — all set along the bustling “Boardwalk” area of the base.

On any given day, the giant square-shaped walkway features the surreal sight of soldiers sipping gourmet coffee and eating chocolate pastries with guns slung across their shoulders, while Canadians play ice hockey at a nearby rink and fighter jets thunder overhead.

The U.S. military says its beef with the burger joints is that they take up valuable resources like water, power, flight and convoy space and that cutting back on non-essentials is key to running an efficient military operation.

“This is a war zone — not an amusement park,” Command Sgt. Maj. Michael Hall wrote in a blog earlier this year.

More like Double Bypass! This thing is both terrifying and captivating, like a harbinger of the apocalypse.

“This product is so meaty, there’s no room for a bun!”

KFC Original Recipe® Double Down

Calories: 540

Fat (g): 32

Sodium (mg): 1380

This one-of-a-kind sandwich features two thick and juicy boneless white meat chicken filets, two pieces of bacon, two melted slices of Monterey Jack and pepper jack cheese and Colonel’s Sauce. This product is so meaty, there’s no room for a bun!

The excellent WeatherSealed by Stephen Von Worley graphically illustrates the battle for dominance in the American fast food stakes: Imagine, if you will, the burger force – a field of energy that radiates…

Many of us know that consumption of sugar (or more likely corn syrup)-laden carbonated drinks is a major cause of the obesity epidemic (see the disinformation® documentary Killer At Large for more on that), but now it seems that they can lead to pancreatic cancer too. Reported by Reuters via RAW Story:

People who drink two or more sweetened soft drinks a week have a much higher risk of pancreatic cancer, an unusual but deadly cancer, researchers reported on Monday.

People who drank mostly fruit juice instead of sodas did not have the same risk, the study of 60,000 people in Singapore found.

Sugar may be to blame but people who drink sweetened sodas regularly often have other poor health habits, said Mark Pereira of the University of Minnesota, who led the study.

“The high levels of sugar in soft drinks may be increasing the level of insulin in the body, which we think contributes to pancreatic cancer cell growth,” Pereira said in a statement.

Insulin, which helps the body metabolize sugar, is made in the pancreas.

Few who saw the documentary Food Inc. will forget the scene involving Beef Products Inc., a South Dakota company that makes a widely used hamburger filler product.

No other industrial-meat company allowed director Robert Kenner to enter the shop floor with his cameras. In sharp contrast, a Beef Products executive invited the Food Inc. crew to record his company’s inner workings. The man is clearly proud of his company’s product. “We think we can lessen the incidence of E. Coli 0157:H7,” he says.

The scene, a clip of which appears above, features the Beef Products executive talking over a scene straight out of Chaplin’s Modern Times: a vast network of steaming tubes, with people in protective gear and face masks wandering about fussing with dials. Evidently, scraps of cow flesh, swept up from slaugtterhouse floors and pulverized into a kind of paste, are moving through the tubes, subjected to a lashings of ammonium hydroxide to kill bacteria.The scene ends with those heavily protected workers carefully packing uniform flesh-colored blocks into boxes. “This is our finished product,” the executive declares. He then claims that the product ends up in 70 percent of hamburgers served in the U.S. “In five years we’ll be in 100 percent,” he predicts.

A segment from the 1990 series, “Buy Me That: Kids and Advertising”, created by HBO in a collaboration with Consumer Reports Television. In this clip, we’ll meet a “makeup artist for food” who surprises us all with this behind-the-scenes look at how burgers (and fries) are made to look their best for television…